Castle in the Pyrenees- one of my favorite Rene Magritte paintings. I often felt that many of my customers were asking me to build them such a castle.
My recent article about things I’ve gotten wrong and had to change my mind about, got me thinking about things that other people seem to believe and which I’ve never found credible.
So here is a very partial list of myths which seem to be popular and which are often repeated by posters and commenters on LinkedIn, why I don’t believe them, and why you shouldn’t, either.
Note that a myth is different than an outright lie in that myths usually contain a kernel of truth. That kernel however has usually been turned into popcorn with hyperbole and then sold well beyond its potential to do any good.
Many of the myths I mention in this piece are used as nirvana fallacy arguments or FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) vectors to delay decarbonization, keeping us happy to burn fossils for longer. This is a strategy which I refer to as predatory delay. Others are marketing ploys, using #hopium to sell people on bad ideas, either to attract credulous investors or public money. As usual, where I’ve written an entire article which addresses the core of the myth, I’ve provided a link to the article as backup.
Electrification Can’t Possibly Replace Fossil Fuels Use
The primary energy fallacy makes the incredibly difficult and expensive problem of decarbonizing our economy, look totally impossible. Fortunately, a little knowledge of thermodynamics shows us that the problem is about 1/3 as hard as the likes of Vaclav Smil would have us believe.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/primary-energy-fallacy-committest-thou-2nd-sin-paul-martin-nty3e
Here’s my most important piece- and one that has needed the least editing since I wrote it. It explains how we can decarbonize- not immediately, not completely, but substantially and in a way that’s not only possible, but practical. The only question is this: will we be wise enough to choose it, and will we grow up and hence give up on trying to find somebody else to pay for it?
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6746179919799300096
Embodied Energy Destroys Decarbonization
Many have argued that solar, wind turbines and especially EV batteries, create so much toxic pollution, mining impact, and GHG emissions in their fabrication, and consume so much fossil raw material, that they cannot generate a net environmental benefit over their lifetimes.
Fortunately, good quality, disinterested 3rd party lifecycle analyses (LCAs) have been done on these topics. These LCAs demonstrate conclusively the following:
- Both wind and solar not only reduce GHG emissions relative to the grid power that they replace, but actually both generate considerably greater exergy returned per unit exergy invested than the next barrel of petroleum that we must find, refine and burn
- EVs produce toxic emissions benefits even on grids which are substantially coal-fired, and on the average grid (such as the US grid at ~ 450 g CO2e/kWh) save tens of tonnes of GHG emissions over their lifecycle in net terms – even if battery recycling is totally ignored (battery recycling reduces GHG emissions even further, as batteries are better ores for the metals they contain than any native ore found on earth)
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/much-ado-embodied-energy-paul-martin
The End of Fossil Fuels Means the End of Fossil Petroleum Chemicals and Materials
A myth often repeated by people who are in the fossil fuel business, but don’t actually understand petroleum refining- or hope that you don’t.
A related myth, this time from the biomass crowd, is that the only feasible decarbonized future involves making materials and chemicals exclusively from biomass. While this is sensible and possible, it is sensible and possible to such a limited niche extent that it is more or less chemical idiocy to think that biomass will be our major source of chemicals and materials post decarbonization.
In fact we can and will make chemicals and materials from petroleum in a decarbonized future. We will do that without the burning, and with no need to throw away 75-85% of every barrel into the lowest value use of those materials to humankind- as fuels. It won’t be cheap, or easy, nor is it a future that any of the fossil fuel industry wants to retreat to- but it isn’t just possible, it’s possible without requiring a single new invention.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/refinery-future-thought-experiment-paul-martin-4pfoc
There’s a Market for CO2- to Make Useful Products
Another myth rather than an outright lie. The amount of CO2 that can be converted into any valuable use, whether chemical or physical, is such a trivial fraction of the total amount of CO2 we generate by burning fossils that it’s not even worth talking about. And the fraction of those uses that will actually meaningfully keep that CO2 out of the atmosphere over its lifecycle are more or less zero. This is just people trying to find revenue streams to prop up carbon capture and storage or its idiot cousin direct air capture- or more properly, to fool you into believing that such revenue streams will ever exist.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/co2-utilization-empty-promise-paul-martin-x0xec
We Need a Circular Economy!
The circular economy is a thermodynamic myth and a dangerous ideological concept. We should instead think about optimal recycle- and focus on cleaning up our energy supply, so the environmentally optimal recycle rate can increase for most things. But the 2nd law dictates that sometimes, the optimal recycle rate will be zero.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/circular-economy-thermodynamic-myth-paul-martin-9nfic
Direct Air Capture is Necessary and Hence Inevitable- the IPCC Says So!
The IPCC does say that to avoid the worst of climate change, after humans have managed to bring fossil GHG emissions to an end, a significant amount of past fossil CO2 emissions will need to be removed from the atmosphere by some means.
That notion, however, is absolutely no justification whatsoever that mechanical/chemical direct air capture (DAC) is either useful or sensible- either now, or in the future. And it ignores DAC’s real use: the main use of the idiot cousin of carbon capture and storage, is as a fossil fueled meme and a predatory delay strategy. And no, improvements in adsorbents, better processes for DAC etc., are unlikely to ever change that conclusion.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-direct-air-capture-sucks-good-way-paul-martin
Excess Renewable Electricity Can Be Used to Make Chemicals
Renewable electricity that would otherwise be curtailed, is a tempting target for all manner of utilization schemes. Electricity markets sometimes even assign this electricity a “negative cost”- tempting, until you understand it better.
The reality is that any strategy to use electricity which is only available a few percent of the time, needs to have extremely low capital cost in order to ever provide a payback.
No chemical manufacturing scheme forced to run only when renewable energy is in excess, will ever have low enough capital cost to meet that requirement. In fact, no chemical manufacturing or even waste treatment scheme will ever have low enough capital to permit it to operate from just sun or just wind energy- the entire output, much less the portion that would be in excess were it grid connected.
And the second you try to run the capital asset at higher capacity factor by importing energy from the grid, you lose the economic benefit (free electricity) you were trying to take advantage of.
Commodities Can Be Made Cheaply By Mass-Producing the Means of Production
The meme of chemical plants consisting of numbered up shipping container-sized modules made in a factory, or of small modular nuclear reactors (SMNRs) comes to mind immediately. This idea gets a failing grade in engineering economics class, again due to marginal capital intensity (the cost of capital per unit of valuable product produced).
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scaling-examples-pt-1-small-modular-nuclear-reactors-smnrs-martin
We Will Make Fuels From Their Combustion Products Using Electricity!
No, we won’t.
Even the simplest e-fuel, hydrogen, fails spectacularly when you take a look at it more than trivially.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-from-renewable-electricity-our-future-paul-martin
And it should stand to reason that every fuel made from hydrogen and something else inert, whether it be nitrogen or CO2, is similarly going to be a failure, for the same reasons- structural inefficiency in the use of both energy and capital.
Here’s a worked example of the 2nd simplest e-fuel: methane, made by reacting electrolytic hydrogen with biogenic CO2. It’s an exergy destroyer on steroids, and a money shredder, which converts $13-$16/GJ electricity into $40-$90/GJ heat, i.e. many times worse than a hardware store electric resistance heater.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/e-methane-exergy-destroyer-steroids-paul-martin-ynhee
Similarly, anybody saying that hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, liquid organic hydrogen carriers, or any other e-fuel is “the new LNG”, is either deluded or lying.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/myth-hydrogen-export-spitfire-research-inc
We also won’t be wasting hydrogen- a 120 million tonne per year commodity chemical, 99% of which is still made from fossils without carbon capture- as a natural gas replacement, even if our wind turbines and solar panels are within reach of a pipeline.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-replace-natural-gas-numbers-paul-martin
This grand myth is so important to so many people, that I had to co-found the Hydrogen Science Coalition to gather allies together to counteract it. It has already siphoned billions of dollars of credulous investment and ill-considered public subsidy, into a vast hole from which no meaningful decarbonization outcome will ever manifest itself.
A related myth is that we must store excess electricity in summer for use in winter. While annual heat storage in aquifers for use in winter can make sense in the right geography, there is no imperative to store excess solar electricity in summer for use to cover “dunkelflaute” events in winter. There are much cheaper and saner options, which make better use of capital.
Wright’s Law Makes Everything Cheaper- Hence Limitless Cheap Hydrogen!
Wright’s Law, the notion that we improve and lower costs with each doubling of production of a new technology, is a real thing that unfortunately is very poorly understood. And no, its ability to limit the cost of future hydrogen cost is very much limited. Hydrogen equipment will not follow a cost reduction curve anything like that experienced by solar, wind and batteries.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scaling-lesson-2-water-electrolysis-paul-martin
Biofuels Are Not Any Kind of Climate Solution
People like Dr. Mark Jacobson would like you to believe this. They point to the fact that biofuels are not zero in GHG or toxic impact, and cannot be scaled to even approximately replace our current fossil fuels use, and both of those points are absolutely correct. But to jump to the conclusion that biofuels are useless and must be avoided, is a non sequitur. Biofuels will be essential as the tools by which we decarbonize aviation and shipping across transoceanic distances. And if we really care about knocking down the last 5% of our fossil GHG emissions, we could store a year’s worth of biogas methane and use it to make power during dunkelflaute events and other emergencies.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/short-screed-biofuels-paul-martin-y7ohc
Decarbonization is Impossible Because We Will Run Out of …
The only thing we have ever “run out of” is the carrying capacity of the earth’s atmosphere for the effluent from burning millions of years’ worth of fossils for energy. There are numerous examples of things which were previously precious, which are now commonplace as a result of a critical invention- aluminum being the key example of that.
The Malthusian predictors of doom who say we will run out of anything- pick your favorite “critical mineral” here- are all wrong. While there are many things where supply will be under stress in the future, most of the confusion in relation to this issue comes from people who confuse reserves with resources and don’t understand what the two terms mean in a mining context.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reserves-versus-resources-cautionary-tale-paul-martin-kxgpc
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/part-3-lithium-cobalt-risky-materials-paul-martin
The other key problem with these arguments is that they usually ignore substitution. In the fossil fuel era, we could only substitute coal with oil or gas or the like- but when we’re talking about batteries, electrical conductors etc., there are numerous choices.
That’s not to say that the ability of individual countries, particularly China, to control certain raw materials or the processing capacity to make finished goods from those raw materials, isn’t worrisome. Rare earth elements (lanthanides), whose worrisome applications are military not cleantech, and even the much more mundane metal magnesium, are examples of where our pursuit of the absolute bottom dollar has allowed China to dominate supply and by so doing, generate not just an industry in China, but also a strategic advantage.
Final Thoughts: Hope is Always Preferable to Despair
I agree with Goethe that hope is always preferable to despair- but only when hope is founded within the limits of physics. False hope is a drug – #hopium- that is pushed by interested parties and by people who benefit from our belief in that false hope whether it turns out to be true or not. We need hope, but must resist #hopium. The very real problems we must face, including the risk of climate change, require sober thought and analysis, not green-wishing.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-hopium-paul-martin
So be careful out there when traveling the world of ideas. There are lots of myths that don’t stand up to scrutiny. There are lots of #hopium pushers and dealers out there, selling you all sorts of horseshit. Don’t be afraid to ask difficult questions, and don’t for a moment assume that merely because an idea is popular in the media, or has been invested in by people with lots of money, that it must be correct.
Disclaimer: this article has been written by a human, without the aid of automated plagiarism software. Humans are known to make mistakes from time to time. If I’ve gone wrong, please point it out to me with good references and I’ll be happy to correct my piece, and my mindset.
If however what you don’t like is that I’ve taken a dump on your pet idea, please complain to my employer, Spitfire Research Inc., who will be happy to tell you to piss off and write your own article.